circular nature of nature

This morning I had several reminders of the joy of the changing seasons. 

A flutter outside my kitchen window focused my sleepy eyes on a small flock of birds feasting on the seeds of a drying garden a few properties to the north. Finally, able to identify them as juncos…all the dates for arrival in my bird book have been in late October or November. Not sure the significance of this….perhaps an early and harsh winter?

Later, puttering in my little garden area, I saw a butterfly on a salvia…same type butterfly in the Spring on a meadow sage. (I posted it here at the time...they look almost identical). 

Just a gracious and happy reminder of the circular nature of nature.

the end of art

Seamus Heaney, RIP

“The end of art is peace…."

                                                                                             From The Harvest Bow

 “It strikes me that the hermit and the poet probably have much in common: the need for solitude; the deep-down awareness of things and the self-discipline to spend hours in contemplation,” 

                                    Fr. Kevin Doran, homily at funeral mass for Seamus Heaney

and you get to smile

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can't help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so.

                                                                                                    Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am not sure lolling about qualifies one for vision and brilliance, but it does look like something that would make me smile a lot. Not feeling particularly visionary, but the weather here is finally nice enough for pool time. (But, I don't have a pool).

memory and time

I am fascinated by concepts of how we perceive time and how memory seems so variable, often changing in each recall. Of course, as a poet, both time and memory are central to my writing. Maria Popova in a brilliant review of Claudia Hamilton’s Time Warped:Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception used this quote connecting memory with how we perceive time:

It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time. It not only gives us the ability to conjure up a past experience at will, but to reflect on those thoughts through autonoetic consciousness — the sense that we have of ourselves as existing across time — allowing us to re-experience a situation mentally and to step outside those memories to consider their accuracy.


Maria Popova's superb blog is: http://www.brainpickings.org/

barriers exist

Various barriers to free expression and privacy have been much in the news, but those barriers often do not apply to me in my every day world. However, barriers exist.

I am truly struggling in a new phase of my poetry to explore some difficult times in my life. Those times are an essential, but mostly an unexpressed part of who I am today. It seems imperative to bring those times openly into my creative process.

But, I have become so aware of my barriers to writing honestly, and even to remembering. The barriers once seemed, or were, essential for self protection in society, relationships, work and ultimately my own self image. Because of change and aging, they are no longer relevant. The question today seems to be, can I remove these fences that block my reach? 

Are they unmovable or a matter of changing perspective?

the humility of sound

Stairs have been so widely written about that I won’t venture to go there. Using the metaphor of the staircase for life’s journey, the spiritual path or even about education has been over-used. But, the blue at night of this particular stairway…which no longer goes anywhere…reminded me of a poem that I do love. (much abbreviated here)

The Blue Stairs

     by Barbara Guest

There is no fear

in taking the first step

or the second or the third

In fact the top can be reached

without disaster

precocious

The code consists in noticing

the particular shade of the staircase

occasionally giving way to the emotions

It has been chosen discriminately

*  *  *  *

It has discovered

in the creak of a footstep

the humility of sound 

merely might have happened

It was one of those unplanned excavations into the back of a closet that caused me to think so much about events from long ago (the 60’s) and how I I remember it now. This photo certainly doesn’t look like the “me” that most people know, yet I somehow don’t think of the years as having quite the external change that has occurred. I love this quote:

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

Joan Didion,

Slouching Towards Bethlehem